When the cook returned to work at the co-op, I was bereft. I didn’t do anything else as well as I had cooking for the co-op, nor did I enjoy any other work I did, certainly not my paying job, as much. To find something I loved, like cooking, that I was good at, was a gift of enormous proportions. On the phone my mother begged me not to become a cook, rattling off a list in opposition to the idea—I would have to work at night with men, the work would be too hard for such a skinny girl since I couldn’t lift those heavy pots, and, the clincher, Southern ladies didn’t cook. Cooks were hired help and treated as such. They were not part of the party, or embraced enthusiastically for their successes, as I was at the co-op.
Mother wanted to believe she had brought me up to be a lady. In short, would I be marriageable if I was a cook, a hired person who had no stature? (I wonder if she ever thought she had succeeded in making me a lady, a person who did not swear, and would have worn white gloves if they were still in fashion; a woman who was gentle and prayerful, always followed the correct form outlined for wives in the Officers Manual of the US Army.) She had loved being a colonel’s wife, the power and respectability it gave her, and grieved when it was gone. She wanted that for me, even while knowing I was not the kind of person who could ever deal with the restrictions. Mother would always just shake her head when people complimented her about me, as if she were surprised that I had accomplished anything, because she was not sure I was a lady.
I knew no lady who worked in a kitchen, although I knew there were a few that owned restaurants and were hostesses in their own restaurants. In 1959 there were hardly any female waitresses in fine-dining restaurants, much less female chefs. I figured I couldn’t even get a job, which was probably true, and that my mother was right. I knew nothing about cooking schools, if there were any. When Julia Child became a national figure on PBS a dozen years later, she made it possible; even though she never worked in a restaurant to my knowledge, she elevated females to a respectable level in the kitchen.
From the moment we met, Dorothea Benton Frank taught me. Though she never told me to lose weight, she shared a tip from her fashion days and told me emphatically to wear V-necked black T-shirts to look skinnier. One look at my arm flaps and she added I should always wear sleeves.
She shared that if one can write funny, one can write one’s own ticket. For her, writing humor wasn’t hard. According to her, she kept a pin in her Pucci pocket for pricking her own pomposity. Recently I reread all of the introductions to her books and laughed at each one, no matter how tragic, no matter the circumstances, and decided rather than a pomposity-pricking pin she used a pen she kept in her Gucci. The pen works better as it contains ink.
She had many virtues, including her love for her family, her generosity to charities, her leadership, and the fact she never wrote about me. When we met I had a certain leeriness of writers. Pat Conroy had written what my husband calls an affectionate caricature of me in Pat Conroy’s Cookbook, “borrowing” parts of my own snail and mountain oyster story and embellishing it. Anne River Siddons had morphed me into a character composite with a friend’s peccadilloes in Hill Towns, which had also hurt my feelings. It had taken me a while to challenge Anne’s husband, Heyward, about it, as in the book “my” character had had some romantic sprees and included a pass at Heyward. Did Heyward really think I had made a pass at him? It was hard to believe. We had not one spark between us, much less a spark of lust on my part. Had he told Anne that to make her jealous, as some husbands do? Or did Anne make it up with delusions about Heyward’s prowess? When I brought the book up, “Oh, no,” he said, “it wasn’t you. That incident was all about a mutual friend of ours I’ll call Hortense. She got drunk and made a pass years ago.” However, as an author Dottie was always direct and open with me, and I figured if she did write about me she would at least make me skinny, sober, and faithful.
We had more in common than wearing black V-necked T-shirts with sleeves. We loved food, cooking, reading, and shared a favorite Charleston dress shop, sometimes even finding out we had purchased the identical items. Cooking was important to both of us and I knew it from her first book, Sullivan’s Island. One either wants to cook, eat something, or have sex as one reads her books. Eating is easiest. Her food is not pretentious, it is all eatable food, duplicable food, food that will make you hungry, even if you have just eaten a meal.
Her female characters are allowed to be titillated—horny even—when looking at a certain man. They are even allowed to sleep with men they wouldn’t ever want to marry. Fortunately for her, Dottie started writing in an era when women could have sex in a book. I took a writing course in 1962 on how to write a romance novel, and it seared me through and through. The teacher said that books didn’t sell when women had sex. To be a successful romance writer, he said, the women had to be virgins, and even their passions would stop short of fulfillment
